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These Islands of Love and Hate
Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 7:43am
If you go on vacation to Jamaica, it is not likely you will get to see or experience it. Around the beachfront property in which you are staying, there will be a high fence. Like all fences, it keeps things out. Mainly, it keeps the Caribbean out. The problem is, you will not see the fence. The landscape artist did his job well – he managed to give the whole resort an illusion of openness – the beach on one side bordered only by the horizon, the perfectly manicured lawns on the other, opening out onto island life behind it, verdant mountains rising in the distance. The fence is invisible. Of course there have been tourists – you may have been one of them – who naturally perceived it, who felt for its weaknesses and with a deep breath, escaped into the beautifully ugly, the violently magical, the tragically wonderful thing that is the Caribbean, the place where I grew up. But that story, of tourists who escape finally into their true destinations, discovering then that paradise is at once uglier and more amazing than any brochure could have had them imagine, is not often told. It is not often told because it is neither a good nor a bad story. It simply is.
Its opposite, however, is almost always a bad story, and one that is increasingly told. For there are moments when it is the Caribbean on the other side that places its large, dark hands against the fence, and feels for weaknesses. Sometimes it isn't tourists that break out, but the Caribbean that breaks in. How many times have we bowed our heads upon hearing this story - Catherine and Benjamin Mullany who visited Antigua for their honeymoon last year, Claudia Von Weis who went to Cuba, Melanie Rose Clarke who came to Jamaica for a wedding, people who found themselves suddenly in the actual place they had flown to – saw it, experienced it, and died for it. In a way, their story isn't new, for hundreds of years people have been discovering the islands of the Caribbean and falling in and out of love with them.
I grew up in Jamaica. But if you ask me what it was like growing up on an island, I would tell you – it never felt like an island. It felt like a country, which is what it was. It felt like the world, which is what it was. For none of us live in the whole world at any one time. We live in small portions of it, and we get to know that small portion. I would say however, that a hotel in the Caribbean is like an island – because it is a small place cut off from the world around it. On one hand who can blame the hotels for doing what they do and for being what they are – fenced off, cut off, sterile enclaves, that offer Caribbean culture to their guests in the same way that they offer Caribbean rum – diluted, safe, with pineapples and a cute umbrella. Full-proof Caribbean culture can be dangerous so the tourist is only given for the evening's entertainment, a band of toothless men playing banjos, and throughout the day smiling women in floral skirts serving mangos and plantains. The tourist watching this parade of pleasant, smiling minstrels will inevitably comment on how slow and easy the pace of life is in the Caribbean. They will have little inkling at the struggle that is always underneath those songs plucked out on the banjos. On one hand, who can blame the hotels from shielding tourists from reality. This is the thing they wanted to escape from anyway. But hotels are inevitably controlled by big money interests intent on making even more money, and here is the sad truth of things – if tourists feel, at least a little terrified of outside, of the real Caribbean, they will keep themselves (and their money) put. It is a careful balancing act this – making tourists feel safe enough to come to the Caribbean, but not so safe to venture into it.
There is such a large thing to say right now, about tragedies like the ones in Antigua and Jamaica and Cuba, and how in the assurances given by Antigua’s Canadian born Commissioner of Police or Jamaica’s British born Assistant Commissioners of Police (as if to assure the world that the savage natives do not police themselves) and all the promises of beefed up security around the hotels, how an unfortunate kind of tourism is being perpetuated in the Caribbean. The tourist is encouraged not to ever really know and how to be suspicious of his host. But that thing is truly large and I do not know how to say it exactly. It would have to be a complicatedly nuanced thing; it would have to make several allowances. After all, big hotels did not create the outside world they seek to protect tourists from: they only exploit it.
Besides, there is an even larger thing to say about the outside world that comes in occasionally – about the Caribbean. It is this world that, for brief moments, whenever there is a tragedy, many will try to understand. It is this world that will be explained through history and sociology – that will be summarized by statistics, GDP, indices of poverty, unemployment rates, homicide rates. But the scientific language of statistics and the language of sociology does not offer a template nor a vocabulary to talk about this larger thing that I want to talk about – about love and hate, and how these things have been brewing in Jamaica, if not the whole Caribbean.
I was born in Kingston. I was born in the time when the word was ‘love’. It was the time of White Flight. It was the 70s. In those days, Jamaica's most charismatic Prime Minister, Michael Manley, mounted a stage and said four words which would become a mantra for the poor. ‘The word is love’ he said. The word is love.
To repeat it now makes it sound like a strange, nebulous thing, a thing without any real substance or meaning. And that was its exact danger. It was a powerful thing that had no meaning. It was like an Old Testament prophecy - it took root in the hearts of the disenfranchised, and they believed that this word would change them and their situations. But it was only rhetoric. In essence, they were empowered into nothing. The strange irony is that the time when the word was love, was actually a quite hateful time.
Many of course do not and cannot see it this way. After all, so many good things happened. Poor, black people who had been previously denied so many good things, who had believed whole-heartedly in their wretchedness and in their physical ugliness, finally began to believe something bigger. To this day there are those who count the decade of the 70s as a success, and maybe in a certain way it was. Many Jamaicans found out suddenly that they could love themselves and who they were and the image which they saw in the mirror. They could also look forward to their own possibilities, the things they could suddenly achieve. The big problem was that the government had given them all this hope, all this love, this wide sense of possibility, but little way of achieving it.
Jamaicans have always been inventive. Many decided they would achieve their possibilities for themselves. What helped was that at this very moment, the large-scale importation of illegal guns had begun. Take note of the following recipe: arm people with a message and then with a machine gun, and they will believe that the second thing can achieve the first; they will believe that guns can achieve love.
You cannot fault people for trying. They tried and they are still trying now. Of course, it doesn't work. And neither sociology nor homicide statistics can pinpoint the moment when the prophesied love turned into hate. As much as people began to love themselves, was as much as they began to hate everything that had oppressed them before, every system that had kept them down – the police, the upper-class, the middle-class, the government, businesses, the school system, the English Language. You see, in that hateful time when I was born, the time when the word was love, all over the island a resentful people began to commandeer vehicles and houses and parcels of land. They drew frightened owners from out of their homes and cars and farms, dumped them onto the streets, and the captors would say triumphantly, "The word is love."
In the time when the word was love, many left. Largely, they were white and Chinese Jamaicans who no longer felt safe. They took their capital with them, leaving Jamaica in an even sorrier state than it was before. Some of these class-war refugees settled in the lands of their summer vacations: Canada, America, England, even Wales like Jeanetta did. Jeanetta became a kind of mother to me when I first moved to Britain. Staying at her home one Christmas, I asked her why she had left Jamaica. I was too young to remember the 70s as I had only lived in that decade for its last year. So she told me, "I was just tired of saying I was sorry. I didn't know how to say it anymore. The island I loved turned around and hated me. They hated me for being white." That same evening in Wales, a neighbour came over and looked at my dark skin and smiled. She declared, "Oh Jeanetta, finally! A proper Jamaican!" I know this statement made her sad, and I realized that this thing which happened in the 70s – when the majority of Jamaicans began to love themselves and began to hate others – it is a complex thing with many truths to it, and many repercussions, and a tragic history projecting itself into the future. I used to imagine Jeanetta back in Jamaica, and I would imagine her in the safe island of a hotel - fenced off from the Caribbean she grew up in and still loves, hoping that it would not break in on her. I only stopped imagining such a thing recently, because Jeanetta really has gone back. She lived in Wales for 20 years, but it is the Caribbean she has always loved.
I have switched places with Jeanetta, and sometimes from this new country, I look back to Jamaica and it is hard for me to understand my own deep love for the place, a country that is occasionally full of such indefensible hatred. And yet, there is something special that grows out of it – this equation of sun and hills and greed and love and slums and political rhetoric that has in it the ring of prophecy... I understand what it means to be an artist in the midst of all of that - the power of Peter Tosh and Buju Banton and Bounty Killer. I understand the power of Bob Marley flashing his locks and singing over and over, One love, One heart! And maybe it is this song, playing in the background of so many 'Come to the Caribbean' commercials that convinces potential tourists that the Caribbean Sea really is full of islands of love. And they are right. These islands are full of so much love. But sometimes that love goes so deep, it arrives on the other side as its opposite.
Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 7:43am
If you go on vacation to Jamaica, it is not likely you will get to see or experience it. Around the beachfront property in which you are staying, there will be a high fence. Like all fences, it keeps things out. Mainly, it keeps the Caribbean out. The problem is, you will not see the fence. The landscape artist did his job well – he managed to give the whole resort an illusion of openness – the beach on one side bordered only by the horizon, the perfectly manicured lawns on the other, opening out onto island life behind it, verdant mountains rising in the distance. The fence is invisible. Of course there have been tourists – you may have been one of them – who naturally perceived it, who felt for its weaknesses and with a deep breath, escaped into the beautifully ugly, the violently magical, the tragically wonderful thing that is the Caribbean, the place where I grew up. But that story, of tourists who escape finally into their true destinations, discovering then that paradise is at once uglier and more amazing than any brochure could have had them imagine, is not often told. It is not often told because it is neither a good nor a bad story. It simply is.
Its opposite, however, is almost always a bad story, and one that is increasingly told. For there are moments when it is the Caribbean on the other side that places its large, dark hands against the fence, and feels for weaknesses. Sometimes it isn't tourists that break out, but the Caribbean that breaks in. How many times have we bowed our heads upon hearing this story - Catherine and Benjamin Mullany who visited Antigua for their honeymoon last year, Claudia Von Weis who went to Cuba, Melanie Rose Clarke who came to Jamaica for a wedding, people who found themselves suddenly in the actual place they had flown to – saw it, experienced it, and died for it. In a way, their story isn't new, for hundreds of years people have been discovering the islands of the Caribbean and falling in and out of love with them.
I grew up in Jamaica. But if you ask me what it was like growing up on an island, I would tell you – it never felt like an island. It felt like a country, which is what it was. It felt like the world, which is what it was. For none of us live in the whole world at any one time. We live in small portions of it, and we get to know that small portion. I would say however, that a hotel in the Caribbean is like an island – because it is a small place cut off from the world around it. On one hand who can blame the hotels for doing what they do and for being what they are – fenced off, cut off, sterile enclaves, that offer Caribbean culture to their guests in the same way that they offer Caribbean rum – diluted, safe, with pineapples and a cute umbrella. Full-proof Caribbean culture can be dangerous so the tourist is only given for the evening's entertainment, a band of toothless men playing banjos, and throughout the day smiling women in floral skirts serving mangos and plantains. The tourist watching this parade of pleasant, smiling minstrels will inevitably comment on how slow and easy the pace of life is in the Caribbean. They will have little inkling at the struggle that is always underneath those songs plucked out on the banjos. On one hand, who can blame the hotels from shielding tourists from reality. This is the thing they wanted to escape from anyway. But hotels are inevitably controlled by big money interests intent on making even more money, and here is the sad truth of things – if tourists feel, at least a little terrified of outside, of the real Caribbean, they will keep themselves (and their money) put. It is a careful balancing act this – making tourists feel safe enough to come to the Caribbean, but not so safe to venture into it.
There is such a large thing to say right now, about tragedies like the ones in Antigua and Jamaica and Cuba, and how in the assurances given by Antigua’s Canadian born Commissioner of Police or Jamaica’s British born Assistant Commissioners of Police (as if to assure the world that the savage natives do not police themselves) and all the promises of beefed up security around the hotels, how an unfortunate kind of tourism is being perpetuated in the Caribbean. The tourist is encouraged not to ever really know and how to be suspicious of his host. But that thing is truly large and I do not know how to say it exactly. It would have to be a complicatedly nuanced thing; it would have to make several allowances. After all, big hotels did not create the outside world they seek to protect tourists from: they only exploit it.
Besides, there is an even larger thing to say about the outside world that comes in occasionally – about the Caribbean. It is this world that, for brief moments, whenever there is a tragedy, many will try to understand. It is this world that will be explained through history and sociology – that will be summarized by statistics, GDP, indices of poverty, unemployment rates, homicide rates. But the scientific language of statistics and the language of sociology does not offer a template nor a vocabulary to talk about this larger thing that I want to talk about – about love and hate, and how these things have been brewing in Jamaica, if not the whole Caribbean.
I was born in Kingston. I was born in the time when the word was ‘love’. It was the time of White Flight. It was the 70s. In those days, Jamaica's most charismatic Prime Minister, Michael Manley, mounted a stage and said four words which would become a mantra for the poor. ‘The word is love’ he said. The word is love.
To repeat it now makes it sound like a strange, nebulous thing, a thing without any real substance or meaning. And that was its exact danger. It was a powerful thing that had no meaning. It was like an Old Testament prophecy - it took root in the hearts of the disenfranchised, and they believed that this word would change them and their situations. But it was only rhetoric. In essence, they were empowered into nothing. The strange irony is that the time when the word was love, was actually a quite hateful time.
Many of course do not and cannot see it this way. After all, so many good things happened. Poor, black people who had been previously denied so many good things, who had believed whole-heartedly in their wretchedness and in their physical ugliness, finally began to believe something bigger. To this day there are those who count the decade of the 70s as a success, and maybe in a certain way it was. Many Jamaicans found out suddenly that they could love themselves and who they were and the image which they saw in the mirror. They could also look forward to their own possibilities, the things they could suddenly achieve. The big problem was that the government had given them all this hope, all this love, this wide sense of possibility, but little way of achieving it.
Jamaicans have always been inventive. Many decided they would achieve their possibilities for themselves. What helped was that at this very moment, the large-scale importation of illegal guns had begun. Take note of the following recipe: arm people with a message and then with a machine gun, and they will believe that the second thing can achieve the first; they will believe that guns can achieve love.
You cannot fault people for trying. They tried and they are still trying now. Of course, it doesn't work. And neither sociology nor homicide statistics can pinpoint the moment when the prophesied love turned into hate. As much as people began to love themselves, was as much as they began to hate everything that had oppressed them before, every system that had kept them down – the police, the upper-class, the middle-class, the government, businesses, the school system, the English Language. You see, in that hateful time when I was born, the time when the word was love, all over the island a resentful people began to commandeer vehicles and houses and parcels of land. They drew frightened owners from out of their homes and cars and farms, dumped them onto the streets, and the captors would say triumphantly, "The word is love."
In the time when the word was love, many left. Largely, they were white and Chinese Jamaicans who no longer felt safe. They took their capital with them, leaving Jamaica in an even sorrier state than it was before. Some of these class-war refugees settled in the lands of their summer vacations: Canada, America, England, even Wales like Jeanetta did. Jeanetta became a kind of mother to me when I first moved to Britain. Staying at her home one Christmas, I asked her why she had left Jamaica. I was too young to remember the 70s as I had only lived in that decade for its last year. So she told me, "I was just tired of saying I was sorry. I didn't know how to say it anymore. The island I loved turned around and hated me. They hated me for being white." That same evening in Wales, a neighbour came over and looked at my dark skin and smiled. She declared, "Oh Jeanetta, finally! A proper Jamaican!" I know this statement made her sad, and I realized that this thing which happened in the 70s – when the majority of Jamaicans began to love themselves and began to hate others – it is a complex thing with many truths to it, and many repercussions, and a tragic history projecting itself into the future. I used to imagine Jeanetta back in Jamaica, and I would imagine her in the safe island of a hotel - fenced off from the Caribbean she grew up in and still loves, hoping that it would not break in on her. I only stopped imagining such a thing recently, because Jeanetta really has gone back. She lived in Wales for 20 years, but it is the Caribbean she has always loved.
I have switched places with Jeanetta, and sometimes from this new country, I look back to Jamaica and it is hard for me to understand my own deep love for the place, a country that is occasionally full of such indefensible hatred. And yet, there is something special that grows out of it – this equation of sun and hills and greed and love and slums and political rhetoric that has in it the ring of prophecy... I understand what it means to be an artist in the midst of all of that - the power of Peter Tosh and Buju Banton and Bounty Killer. I understand the power of Bob Marley flashing his locks and singing over and over, One love, One heart! And maybe it is this song, playing in the background of so many 'Come to the Caribbean' commercials that convinces potential tourists that the Caribbean Sea really is full of islands of love. And they are right. These islands are full of so much love. But sometimes that love goes so deep, it arrives on the other side as its opposite.
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